Risinger on Law Librarians as Pioneer Woman Law Professors

D. Michael Risinger, Seton Hall University School of Law, has posted Female Law Librarians as Pioneer Women Law Professors: A (Belated) Response to Dean Kay, with Some Suggested Additions to Her Canonical List:

The late Herma Hill Kay was the preeminent cataloguer of the pioneer women law professors of the modern era, that is, those who taught after the advent of formalized quality recognition of law schools, either through membership in the Association of American Law Schools (which began in 1900) or through American Bar Association accreditation (which began in 1923). Dean Kay excluded from her list female law librarians who held titles of ordinary faculty professorial rank, apparently because, form her point of view, they were not recognized as “full-fledged” faculty members. In my view this was a questionable omission. The very fact that they were granted professorial rank, at a time when such status was rare for law librarians and even rarer for female law librarians, cuts strongly in favor of adding them to any list of pioneer women law faculty, and to that end the article identifies those librarians who carried professorial rank at ABA/AALS law schools from 1923 through 1959 for inclusion on the list of pioneer woman law professors.

But first, the article address a broader methodological point concerning Dean Kay’s list. Dean Kay sought to include in her list of female pioneer law professors only those who would have been fully recognized as members of the legal academy, even by the dominant males of the academy. Under this stringent standard, she counted only female faculty members at schools that were both ABA-accredited and admitted to membership in the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). I have no quibble with a restrictive approach, directed as it is to an important question of the status of women in the legal academy. However, accepting Dean Kay’s time frame, which is anchored to the beginning of ABA accreditation in 1923, I believe it was a mistake to exclude female full-time faculty with professorial rank at ABA-accredited law schools which were not members of the AALS. There were not many of these—the article only identifies three. But these three should be on any list of pioneer woman law professors.

--Dan Ernst

Teaching Legal History Online

I imagine that many of you, like me, are devoting part of the summer to reconfiguring a legal history course for online--and not merely remote--instruction.  If so, in addition to whatever guidance your home institution is providing, consider consulting the American Historical Association’s recent initiative, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Confronting a Pandemic: Historians and COVID-19,” which includes the AHA Online Teaching Forum, and a Remote Teaching Wiki.  Among the resources is a link to Steven Minz’s twenty-two minute video, Engaging Students Online.  I’ve also been learning from some of the webinars conducted by teachers of business-school cases hosted by Harvard Business Publishing, as well as its audio series, Online Teaching Survival Guide.

The American Society for Legal History has created a Google Group Discussion, originally (as its title, Legal History Records Discussion Group, suggests) to promote exchange about digitized legal history sources but subsequently widened to include discussion of online teaching.  The recently updated Legal History on the Web, hosted by Duke University, includes a portal to Primary Source Databases/Web Archives, but I do not know of a legal-history-specific wiki, where we might make available to each other, say, short lectures to use as asynchronous components in our courses.  (John Fabian Witt’s short lectures on the legal history of contagious disease in the United States would be an example.)  We cannot maintain such a wiki on Legal History Blog, but we do encourage interested legal historians to join the ASLH discussion group–especially if they are already members or promptly join ASLH–and I’ll monitor comments to this post to gauge interest.

Update: @RachelGurvich is way ahead of me. H/t: LPK

--Dan Ernst

News from NARA

[We are grateful to Mitch Fraas for forwarding this letter from David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States.  DRE]

National Archives, 1939 (LC)

Dear Researchers:

It seems like so long ago since we last saw you in our research rooms.

We miss seeing you and helping you with your research. The National Archives is committed to the health and safety of our staff, volunteers and the public. With the closure of our facilities, we have adjusted our operations to balance the need to conduct our mission-critical work while also adhering to safety guidelines from the federal government. National Archives staff has continued to serve the public by responding to as many inquiries as possible while working remotely. Many of our services are available online:

• The National Archives Catalog contains archival descriptions of our holdings and is the online portal to our digital records.

• National Archives staff is responding to reference questions or requests for records sent to inquire@nara.gov and to specific units’ email addresses.

• Researchers can ask—or answer—research questions on History Hub, a crowdsourced history research platform sponsored by the National Archives. Researchers can also search History Hub to see if a question has already been asked and answered.

• Members of the public can explore our online resources by visiting http://www.archives.gov and viewing our online exhibits. • Teachers and parents can use our educational resources. • Everyone can help the whole community by volunteering in our Citizen Archivist Missions.

• The National Archives’ Presidential Libraries and Museums web site includes online education resources, virtual programs and exhibits, and information on conducting remote research at the 14 Libraries. We have also been using this time to undertake projects that will have long-term benefits for public access. 2 National Archives staff has been working remotely to create and update finding aid data to enhance your research. Since March 16, we have added 234,139 archival descriptions and 6,477,642 digitized pages to the National Archives Catalog. Staff has also been tagging and transcribing records in the Catalog. Transcribing records, especially hand-written documents, makes these records easier to find.

Since March, the number of available tags and transcriptions in the Catalog has tripled. The Catalog now provides over 115 million digital copies of our holdings and we continue to add more every day. Sign up for our Catalog Newsletter to find out about new additions to the Catalog and projects that you can do with us. Check out our popular Record Group Explorer, a finding aid that provides visualizations of the data in our Catalog and provides simple paths into the records. The work we are currently doing better positions us to make access happen while at the same time helping to keep you and our staff safe. Nevertheless, we understand that our remote services are not a substitute for being physically in the research room. We know you are anxious to return, and we are too.

At this point, we cannot tell you when that will be possible. We are working diligently on our plans for the gradual reopening of our facilities across the country, in consultation with our colleagues at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. The reopening plans will be based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Office of Management and Budget, as well as information from subject matter experts from within and outside of the federal government. The reopening of each research room will occur based on our assessment of local conditions against a set of established criteria.

We are also looking at how we can promote the safety, health, and well-being of our staff, volunteers, and the public when we do reopen our facilities for research. This will mean changes to promote social distancing, changes to cleaning procedures for shared spaces and equipment, and some process changes. We will communicate with you about these changes as we get closer to reopening. After we reopen, we will provide opportunities for you to engage with us as we work to improve the researcher experience while also keeping everyone safe. Thank you for your patience as we carry out our mission during this unprecedented time. We send our best wishes for your good health and wellbeing, and we look forward to the day when we can welcome you back to our facilities.

Sincerely, David S. Ferriero

Archivist of the United States

[Also: NARA find the "Juneteenth" order.   WaPo.]

Cohen Student Essay Competition

[We have the following annoucement.  DRE]

The Legal History and Rare Books Section (LHRB) of the American Association of Law Libraries, in cooperation with Gale Cengage Learning, announces the annual Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition. The competition is named in honor of Morris L. Cohen, late Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Cohen’s scholarly work was in the fields of legal research, rare books, and historical bibliography.

The purpose of the competition is to encourage scholarship in the areas of legal history, rare law books, and legal archives, and to acquaint students with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and law librarianship. Essays may be on any topic related to legal history, rare law books, or legal archives. The competition is open to students currently enrolled in accredited graduate programs in library science, law, history, and related fields. Both full- and part-time students are eligible. Membership in AALL is not required.

The winner will receive a $500 prize from Cengage Learning and will present the essay at an LH&RB sponsored webinar. The winner and runner-up will have the opportunity to publish their essays in LH&RB’s online scholarly journal Unbound: A Review of Legal History and Rare Books.  Winners have gone on to publish the winning article in other noted journals also.

For more information and deadlines, please see the announcement, full rules, and application.

The deadline for application is July 31, 2020.

Empires of Vice: A First Book with Multiple Audiences

It is a pleasure to contribute to the Legal History Blog. My first book, entitled Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia was published recently. Throughout the month of June, I’ll be sharing a set of posts about this book, dwelling on the multiple audiences that I hope it may “speak” to.

As Dan Ernst mentioned in his kind introduction, I received my Ph.D. in political science, currently teach at an interdisciplinary school oriented toward international affairs and policy, and have written a book in the Histories of Economic Life series of Princeton University Press. Like many interdisciplinary creatures, I find it both exciting and challenging to articulate how and why my work matters to whom.

Empires of Vice is a book for political scientists, historians, specialists of Asian Studies, and policy makers, in overlapping but different ways. It is a book about the inner life of a bureaucratic state (that urges political scientists to be more curious about how the nitty-gritty ways that states actually govern). It is also a book about the anti-opium turn of multiple European empires across Southeast Asia during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (that gives reasons for historians to pay more attention to a place and process of change often run roughshod over in prevailing narratives about empires and opium that focus mainly on the British empire, India, and China). And Empires of Vice is also a book about how colonial legacies have shaped Southeast Asia's illicit economies and punitive drug laws today, which more broadly addresses normative challenges and policy implications for transnational problem-solving. 

Each of my posts will elaborate on these points. In addition, I plan to incorporate brief reflections on the practical aspects of “speaking” to different audiences in our current moment.

I write a time when the COVID-19 epidemic continues to unfold globally, making travel, in-person gatherings, conferences, and many conventional ways of presenting scholarship not possible. It is also an impassioned time in the United States where I live, with resounding calls for social change, anxious aspirations for and collective action aimed at profoundly refashioning the existing order. It thus feels like an especially difficult and selfish time to have a new book out. At the same time, it is also feels like an especially important time to think about alternative modes of virtual presentation that may very well become a new norm; to figure out ways to be clear about relevance, in the sense of being explicit about when and how one’s scholarship may (or may not) speak to ongoing events without detracting from its value. 

I have benefitted immensely from wonderful examples of scholars sharing their new books through podcasts (see Claire Edington’s Beyond the Asylum with the New Books Network), online interviews (see Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life with Notches), blogposts (see Jill Hasday’s Intimate Lies and the Law with the Legal History Blog) and other forms of virtual presentation (see this online book party for Arunabh Ghosh’s Making it Count). I hope to add to this growing digital archive, by sharing what I wish I had known in advance of some of the podcasts, interviews, short essays that I have done recently: seemingly mundane practical details that ended up mattering a lot for expressing ideas and communicating through different types of media (zoom, phone chats, written scripts), with different types of interlocutors (interviewers as my own students, colleagues, total strangers), and for different audiences (across disciplines and beyond the academy). I’ll also be linking to recently published books by people I admire, especially first-time authors in legal history, histories of empire, political science, and Southeast Asian studies.

I’ll wrap up this first post with an invitation. I’d love to learn from others with first books with multiple audiences, and also welcome suggestions from more seasoned authors and colleagues with more experience ushering their books into the virtual world. 

In my next post, I’ll be writing with legal historians in mind as an audience, highlighting how Empires of Vice explores the inner life of bureaucracies and its use of administrative archives for British and French colonial opium monopolies across Southeast Asia. I’ll also dwell on preparing for my interview with The Docket, the digital imprint of Law and History Review. 

—Diana Kim

Author’s Photograph.
Card Catalogue at Archives nationales d’outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence, France)

What is a Legal Book?

[We have the following announcement of an on-line workshop from Max Planck.  DRE]

Workshop: Current topic in legal history: What is a legal book? Crossing perspectives between legal history and book history.  June 18, 2020, 15:00-17:00
Manuela Bragagnolo

In a 2008 article published in Rg, Antonio Manuel Hespanha stated the importance of bridging the gap between material bibliography and legal history. He stressed the need to expand the scope of legal historical research, which had up to that point traditionally focused on the intellectual output of the so-called ‘author’. In particular, he suggested to take into account the materiality the object that, with the emergence of print, contributed more than any other form of media to the storage, mobilisation and communication of normative knowledge: books, namely legal books. In that article Hespanha clearly showed the interdependence between form and content in early modern legal books.

Legal books served a variety of different purposes and consisted of different literary genres catering to different readerships. Books were much more than instruments used by the ‘men of law’ at the universities and in courts. Handbooks and pragmatic books, the topics of which also included the expansive fields of moral theology and religious normativity, were also fundamental tools through which ‘legal literacy’ reached a wider audience.

But what was a legal book for the actors involved in the book production (eg printers), book circulation (books sellers) and, in general, book consumption (for instance ‘universal bibliographers’)? What categories did these actors use to classify them? If we think about the Ibero-American world, what was considered a ‘libro juridico’? And how did this category change over time? These are some of the questions that the workshop aims to address, by creating the space for a dialogue between legal historians and book historians, starting from a methodological discussion on the sources and the methods that can be used to analyse the ‘legal book’.

Since the exchange and production of knowledge can never truly be stopped, new avenues of communication and dialogue must be explored. In accordance with this guiding principle, we will hold this workshop online. For more information, please send an email to bragagnolo@rg.mpg.de.

Weekend Roundup

• The Federal Judicial Center has a new documentary history in its series of Famous Federal Trials: U.S. v. Albert B. Fall: The Teapot Dome Scandal, by Jake Kobrick.

• New online from American Journal of Legal History and Oxford Academic: Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France: 1870s–1913, by James Donovan. 

• Here is an excellent webpage on digital archival research by the Mina Rees Library off the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.   

• “The University of New Brunswick has removed George Duncan Ludlow's name from its law faculty building in Fredericton after concerns were raised last year over his involvement in residential schools and his legal endorsement of slavery.” (CBC).

• Ryan Shymansky, a 2019 Georgetown Law graduate, has published the note The Great Bulwark of ...Political Liberties”: The Decline of Jury Power and the Rise of Slave Interests in the Early American Republic in the Georgetown Law Journal.  It originated as a paper for my Georgetown law colleague John Mikhail. DRE

•  ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen reviews Robert Dallek's presidential history, How Did We Get Here?  (WaPo).  Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, Michigan Law, on the fopunders and the nondelegation doctrine (The Atlantic).  Ken Bridges on Heman Sweatt and the integration of University of Texas Law School (Waco Today).

• Update: Stephen Vladeck on the federal government's authority to use troops in Minneapolis: the thread and the historical article.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Weekend Roundup

•  Over at Jotwell, Deborah Dinner has a notice of Nate Holdren's  forthcoming Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press).

• “Katrina Jagodinsky will use a three-year, $460,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how habeas corpus was used in the American West by various marginalized groups to claim freedom and establish their rights between 1812 and 1924.”  More.

• Now available online from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: “The Work of Some Irresponsible Women”: Jurors, Ghosts, and Embracery in the Irish Free State," by Mark Coen.  “This article examines a campaign of jury intimidation conducted by female Republicans in the Irish Free State from 1926 to 1934.”

• Ronald K.L. Collins has posted Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Fight for the Free Press: When Benjamin Franklin’s Grandson was Jailed for Critiquing His President (Part I), over at First Amendment Watch.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York State Courts is a post summarizing John Oller’s article, forthcoming in Judicial Notice, entitled “George Wickersham: ‘The Scourge of Wall Street.’”  The video of the Society’s webinar, "Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic," is here; its video, "The Evolution of Slavery, Abolition in NY, and the NY Courts: The Lemmon Slave Case," is here.

• ICYMI: Lizabeth Cohen on The Lessons of the Great Depression (The Atlantic)  David Bernstein on administrative constitutionalism (Volokh Conspiracy).  Transcribing manuscripts as a productive escape from pandemic blues (WaPo).

• Sadly but not surprisingly, the Law Books course at Rare Books School, taught by Mike Widener (assisted by Ryan Greenwood) has been cancelled for summer 2020. 

• If you're not already zoomed out: Fridays at 6pm Eastern Time is Drinking with Historians, hosted by Matt Gabriele (Virginia Tech) and Varsha Venkatsubramanian (UC-Berkeley) and with a different guest each week. Registration is here.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Weekend Roundup

• The 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellows have been announced. They include Rohit De, our guest blogger this month.

Stephen Field, J. (LC)

• The Supreme Court Historical Society has announced the acquisition of Stephen Field’s Docket Book for the 1885 Term.

• Over at the blog of the Historical Society of the New York Courts is John D. Gordan, III,’s post on his forthcoming article Judicial Notice on United States v. William Fullerton (March 1870).  The Society's webinar, Lessons Learned from the 1918 Flu Pandemic, is now up on YouTube.

• A historian’s and legal scholar’s amicus brief in support of the claim that people born in US territories have a constitutional right to US citizenship has been filed in Fitisemanu v United States (10th Cir.).

• The Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador is seeking expressions of interest from its membership to fill a vacancy on the SS Daisy Legal History Committee, created for “the preservation of Newfoundland and Labrador’s legal heritage,” by May 19.

• ICYMI: Jed Shugerman on the Founders and the president’s finances (WaPo).  The Corrupt Bargain,” Eric Foner’s review essay on the Electoral College in the London Review of Books. Princeton's obituary of John Murrin and WaPo's of Barbara Babcock.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis

American Predatory Lending and the Global Financial Crisis, a website with data visualizations, oral histories, and policy analyses, is now live, under the rubric of the Bass Connections project within Duke University.  It is the creation of a multidisciplinary team, including fifteen Duke and two University of North Carolina students under the leadership of Edward Balleisen, Professor of History and Public Policy andVice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies; Lee Reiners, Director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School; Joseph Smith, former North Carolina Commissioner of Banks, and Debbie Goldstein, Director of the Duke North Carolina Forum.

--Dan Ernst

The YLS Exhibit, “Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd,” Now Online

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

If distance or the coronavirus shutdown prevented you from viewing the Yale Law Library's Spring 2020 rare book exhibition, "Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd: Readers' Marks in Law Books," there is good news. The exhibition is now online, as part of the Yale University Library's Online Exhibitions website.

The 39 volumes in the exhibition, spanning seven centuries and three continents, were selected for their research potential and for the insights they provide into the roles law books have played in people's lives. The marks left by readers document the lived experience of the law, and remind us that law is above all a human endeavor. The exhibition is the latest in a series that examine law books as physical artifacts, and the relationships between their form and content.

The exhibition's title comes from John Anstey's verse satire of the legal profession, "The Pleader's Guide" (1796): "Precedents so scrawl'd and blurr'd / I scarce could read one single word."

A Query on the Legal History of Epidemics

[We have received the following request.  DRE.]

The David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History at Tel Aviv University is putting together a web page with links to sources – primary and secondary – on the legal history of epidemics, their consequences, and responses to them. Please send any sources and resources to David Schorr at dschorr@tauex.tau.ac.il.

NARA Reading Rooms and Presidential Libraries Closed

We previously reported the closure of the Library of Congress to the pubic until April 1.  Now NARA has announced the closure of all its research rooms and presidential libraries at the close of business today.

--Dan Ernst

Just Money: Design and Change over Time

We’ve learned of an impressive new website, Just Money, which aims to “provide a platform for discussion and debate over money’s design and its change over time.”  More particularly:

On this website, we approach money as a legal project.  Created to meet demands both public and private, money depends on law for its definition, issue, and operation.    That legal structure of money – its design – matters deeply.  In the words attributed to an early  banker, “those who create and issue money . . . direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.”   Our aim is to encourage discussion, debate, and scholarship on money’s design and its reform towards a world that is as just as it is (economically) productive.

Money, governance, and the public welfare are intimately connected in modern society.    Most obviously, the way political communities make money and allocate credit is an essential vector of material life.  It critically shapes economic processes – channeling liquidity, fueling productivity, and influencing distribution.  At the same time, those decisions about money and credit define key political structures, locating in particular hands the authority to mobilize public resources, determining opportunities for individuals and industries, and delegating power and privileges to create credit and accumulate profit.  Finally, modes of making money shape categories and strategies at the collective level, including the incentives we institutionalize, the assumptions we grow to share, and the possibilities we learn to recognize.

Christine Dean, Harvard Law School, writes that discussions will address both historical and contemporary topics.  “For example, I just posted an argument about the way new forms of money fueled the industrial revolution, here.  Ongoing and future roundtables include those on ‘Virtual Currency and the State’ and ‘Race and Money.’

–Dan Ernst

LC Manuscript Division to Close until April 1

The Library of Congress will close to the public today at 5:00 pm and not reopen before 8 am on April 1.

As of this posting, and according to NARA’s website, Archives 1 and 2 are still open to researchers.  Public events are canceled through May 3.  The following regional centers are closed to the public: John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, National Archives at Seattle, National Archives at New York City, National Archives at Chicago.

--Dan Ernst

Nevers and Krishnaswami on Statutory Notes in the US Code

Shawn G. Nevers, Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School, and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Yale Law School, have posted The Shadow Code: Statutory Notes in the United States Code, which is forthcoming in volume 112 of the Law Library Journal:

28 U.S.C. §1350 (2012).

Many legal researchers may be unaware that some valid statutory provisions appear as statutory notes rather than in sections of the United States Code. This article examines the history, creation, and purpose of statutory notes in the United States Code, and provides data on the number of statutory notes that exist. It also explores the challenges statutory notes present in the research process and offers guidelines and best practices for researching and teaching this often overlooked aspect of the United States Code.

--Dan Ernst

New from the FJC History Office

The History Office of the Federal Judicial Center is out with two new websites.  The first, Cases that Shaped the Federal Courts, groups the Office’s case summaries, discussion questions, and excerpted documents in relation to various topics: Defining the Judiciary; Federal Jurisdiction; Federalism; Habeas Corpus; Judicial Independence; Judicial Review; Justiciability; Non-Adjudicatory Roles of Federal Judges; and Remedies.  The second is a series of essays on the history of the Rules of Practice and Procedure in the Federal Courts.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Lately, the History Office of the Federal Judicial Center has been supplementing its usual tweets with threads on particular federal cases. Here is one on Amistad; ongoing is one on Ableman v. Booth.

• In the New York Times: Jane Manners and Lev Menand (both fellows at Columbia Law School) draw on history to discuss whether the Supreme Court will protect agencies from Trump’s reach. Also in the NYT: Mary Ziegler (Florida State University College of Law) on why “The Heartbeat Bills Were Never the Real Threat to Abortion Rights.” 

• Ziegler also has an op-ed in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: "The question no one is asking about the Supreme Court and abortion." Also in the WaPo: legal historian Bruce Mann may not be the First Man in 2021, but "losing primary candidates still influence the race," says Anastasia Curwood (University of Kentucky).

• Over at the University of Minnesota's Riesenfeld Rare Books is this Swedish law book exhibit.

• The American Historical Association is now accepting nominations for its 2020 awards and prizes, including the Littleton-Griswold Prize for “the most distinguished book on US law and society, broadly defined.”

• The March 2020 issue of the Journal of American History is out with the following principal articles:  “The Properties of Capitalism: Industrial Enclosures in the South and the West after the American Civil War,” by Emma Teitelman; “Truth in the Jungle of Literature, Science, and Politics: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Food Control Reforms during the Progressive Era,” by Rüdiger Graf; “The Evolution of Environmental (In)Justice in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1900– 2000,” by Andrew Gutkowski; and “Bananas North, Deportees South: Punishment, Profits, and the Human Costs of the Business of Deportation,” by Adam Goodman.

• ICYMI: Henry J. Abraham, a historian of the US Supreme Court, has died (WaPo).  Baylor law, history students ‘relitigate’ Boston Massacre trial 250 years later. “Corpus linguistics” originalism on the Second Amendment (HNN). A University of North Georgia student and the keys to Leo Frank’s cell (Gainesville Times).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Readers' Marks in Law Books: A Yale Law Library Exhibit

[The Yale Law Library has a new exhibit, Precedents So Scrawl’d and Blurr’d: Readers’ Marks in Law Books.  I’m told that one of the stars of the exhibit is the great Contracts scholar Arthur Corbin.  DRE.]

Books are the lawyer's tools and the law student's laboratory, and nothing brings this home better than the marks that they leave in their books. Over 30 such annotated and inscribed books from the Lillian Goldman Law Library are on display in "Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd: Readers' Marks in Law Books," the Spring 2020 exhibition from the library's Rare Book Collection.

Exhibition curator Mike Widener, the Law Library's rare book librarian, selected items that offer both research potential and insights into the roles that law books have played in people's lives. The marks left by readers document the lived experience of the law, and remind us that law is above all a human endeavor.

The exhibition's title comes from John Antsey's verse satire of the legal profession, "The Pleader's Guide" (1796): "Precedents so scrawl'd and blurr'd / I scarce could read one single word."

Many of the volumes illustrate the work of lawyers, law students, law professors, and authors throughout the centuries. Doodles suggest the writers taking a break from dreary legal studies. Scraps of poetry can be sources for literary scholars. Readers also used their books to record events, ranging from a drunken outburst in the New Jersey assembly to a famous naval battle of the War of 1812 and the beheading of Henry VIII's fifth queen.

"These books represent a small fraction of the annotated books in the Yale Law Library's rare book collection," said Widener. "They demonstrate the value of collecting these artifacts, and constitute the Law Library’s invitation to explore them further."

"Precedents So Scrawl'd and Blurr'd" is the latest in a series of exhibitions that examine law books as physical artifacts, and the relationships between their forms and content. It is on display March 2 to June 17, 2020, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, located on Level L2 of the Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven CT). The exhibition is open to the general public 10am-6pm daily, and open to Yale affiliates until 10pm.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, phone (203) 432-4494 and email <mike.widener@yale.edu>.

Oates on the Transylvania Law Library

Charles Harmon Oates, Regent University, has posted Foraging the Transylvania Law Library: A Unique and Valuable Collection:

A good library is the heartbeat of a law school’s operation. As Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell once observed “[t]he law library has been the object of our greatest and most constant solicitude. We have…constantly inculcated the idea that the library is the proper workshop of professors and students alike; that it is to us all that the laboratories of the university are to the chemists and physicists, the museum of natural history to the zoologists, the botanical garden to the botanists.”

The book collection itself necessarily reflects the mission and character of the school. Perhaps nowhere is this better demonstrated than by the unique collection that once comprised the law library of the Transylvania University Department of Law.

Established in 1799, this frontier law school, through the tutelage of some notable faculty, trained many of our young nation’s finest lawyers, jurists, legislators and statesmen. For over fifty years the law department flourished. At its zenith, the law department’s course of study was more comprehensive than either Yale or Harvard and its law library was reputed to be among the best equipped in the nation. Through a tragic series of events, the law department subsequently began a spiraling decline that lasted more than half a century, terminating in the final locking of its doors in 1912. Amazingly, much of its law library collection has survived the abuses of heavy usage, packing, relocation, the better part of a century in unprotected storage, and exposure to insects and mildew. The Regent University Law Library was fortunate to purchase this unique and valuable collection in 1994. It comprises the major part of Regent Law Library’s Founders Collection.

This article will examine the Transylvania Law Department’s contribution to American legal education in the nineteenth century, discuss the development of the school’s historic library collection, and provide an annotated bibliography of a selection of those rare and unique volumes of particular relevance for researchers that contributed most to the Common Law foundation of American law and history. Part II explores the history of the Law Department and briefly reveals what life and legal education were like at the first law school west of the Appalachians. Part III focuses on the development of the collection itself. The annotated bibliography in Part IV offers the reader a glimpse of this historic collection by describing in some detail those rare and unique volumes significant to our modern understanding of the Common Law foundation of American law.

--Dan Ernst